BURLINGTON, Iowa — After a long day stumping in eastern Iowa, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and his wife Ann unwound by watching the New England Patriots make a bid to become the first undefeated NFL team since 1972. The team won two Super Bowl championships when he served as the governor of the Patriots’ home state of Massachusetts.

The Romneys took in the game at a cavernous sports bar, along with staff and reporters. However, they left at halftime, when the Patriots trailed the New York Giants.

Yes, the Patriots came from behind to win, 38-35.  But what did they think of the game before he left? Sadly we can’t tell you, as the event was “off the record.” But at least we have a photo.

And a new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll out Sunday showed Romney trailed rival Mike Huckabee by one point just a few days before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses….another comeback in the making?

MAQUOKETA, Iowa — Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s campaign walks a fine line, linking her to her husband’s White House record and promoting her as a candidate running on her own merits.

The folks who sell Clinton political memorabilia independently at campaign events face no such quandary.  Among their array of t-shirts, bumper stickers and hats are assorted political buttons that remind voters of Bill Clinton’s controversial 1992  campaign promise that his supporters would get “two for the price of one.”

“DO YOU MISS CLINTON?” reads one shiny button, over a picture of the couple in front of the White House. “VOTE FOR MRS. CLINTON ‘08″

Another reads “BRING BACK PEACE, PROSPERITY” with their picture and the words “THE CLINTONS!” printed below.

Alas, the buttons aren’t two for one. One button costs $5, or they cost three for $10.

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young

NASHUA, N.H. - When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dropped by a diner here this week to chat up voters, Harry Harris, 51, was happy to meet him and didn’t mind accepting one of his campaign stickers.

However, when asked by reporters if he was in the Romney camp, Harris made clear his vote is still up for grabs.

“There are way too many people and it’s too much information,” said Harris, a limousine driver, as he had breakfast at Norton’s Classic Cafe. “I’m still trying to read up on everything I can.”

Harris is an independent who is typical of many New Hampshire voters who have not finalized their choice with only 10 days left before that early-voting state’s primary contest. The nominating contest has tightened on both the Democratic and Republican sides in the last few weeks. In New Hampshire, predicting the race is made all the more difficult by the state’s high proportion of independent voters.

“People in New Hampshire, particularly the independent voters, wait until late before they make a final decision,” Republican hopeful Sen. John McCain said on Friday. He has been soaring in polls in the state giving Romney a run for his money.

Independents were a main base of support for McCain when he won New Hampshire in 2000 against George W. Bush who ended up winning the nomination and the White House. But this year, many independents who lean Republican are also looking closely at Romney.

More than four in 10 voters in New Hampshire are “unaffiliated.” Those voters, whose ranks have been growing, outnumber the voters in each of the two main parties and they can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary.

Polls show that on the Democratic side, Sen. Barack Obama is attracting more independents than his rivals like Hillary Clinton who has a strong base of support within her party and is seen as weaker among independents.

Obama’s fortunes may be interwined with McCain’s, said Stephen Wayne, professor of government at Georgetown University. “If McCain does well in New Hampshire, Obama is hurt,” Wayne said. “I think Hillary is rooting for McCain.”

Many New Hampshire-ites do not like to admit it but what could be hugely significant to their vote is the outcome of the Iowa caucus next Thursday. The five-day gap between the caucus and the New Hampshire primary is a shorter window than in past years and analysts are unsure how that will affect the race.

“It would be foolish from people in New Hampshire to make up their minds before they see the Iowa results,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

The two states often go their separate ways in the nomination process but not always. In 2004, New Hampshire essentially “ratified” Sen. John Kerry as the Democratic choice after the senator won Iowa, Sabato said.

For Michelle Strout, 33, a fundraiser for Southern New Hampshire University, the candidates and their convictions matter more than party affiliation.

“For me the core of it all is I would vote for whoever was going to be the most honest,” she said. Strout views Clinton, Obama and Romney as “too rehearsed” and she said she was likely to vote for McCain. 

– Additional reporting by Scott Malone

– Photo credit: Scott Malone, Keith Bedford

FORT MADISON, Iowa – Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign rolled out a new television ad on Saturday dubbed “Hope,”  emphasizing the Illinois senator’s pledge to fight against special interest influence in Washington, improve America’s reputation abroad, and “bring a fractured people together.”
 
The theme was pushed heavily not only by the candidate in his weekend stumping but also by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who joined Obama on Saturday to tell would-be voters his presidency would be “game-changing.”
 
“We have an opportunity as a generation not just to restore American prestige and confidence but to take it to a whole new level,” the governor told reporters while traveling on a bus through Iowa from one Obama campaign event to another. 
 
“He and I really believe in the power of hope,” the governor said. “That is a thing that people build lives on.” 
 
Obama, who has been dogged by concerns about his electability and relatively short stint of experience in government, fought back against those criticisms Saturday, saying he was the only Democrat that could beat any Republican next November. He said that while he may have less government experience than some of his rivals, he had the right kind of “life” experience to offer Americans hope for improvements in a range of social programs. 
 
He also offered a light-hearted spin. “I’m a black guy running for president named Barack Obama,” he told a crowd in Fort Madison. “I  must be hopeful. I must have hope.” 
 
The message seemed to resonate. One woman was overheard remarking to a friend afterward:  “I don’t care how big his ears are, I think he’d make a great president.”

– Photo credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford

SERGEANT BLUFF, Iowa — In the final days before the Iowa caucuses, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has launched aggressive ads against rivals John McCain and Mike Huckabee. But on the campaign trail, he’s using a different weapon: his wife Ann.

The loyal political spouse, gazing lovingly at her husband, is as much a fixture of American politics as giant stars-and-stripes backdrops. Democratic hopeful Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, has featured prominently in his campaign stops and former president Bill Clinton has stumped extensively to help his wife Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.

But in the final leg of Romney campaign before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, it’s sometimes seems unclear whether Ann or Mitt has top billing.

In campaign stops on Friday and Saturday, Anne spoke nearly as long has her husband, discussing her battle with multiple sclerosis and the difficulty of raising five boys.

While Romney’s sharp-edged ads filled the airwaves, his wife praised him as a devoted father and husband, drawing an implicit contrast to rivals like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani whose personal lives have not been so squeaky clean.

 ”When I’ve had troubles and difficulties, he’s been right behind me, and right beside me,” she said, fleshing out one of Romney’s major themes: the importance of family.

“There’s no work in America that’s more important to our future than the work that goes on in the four walls of the American home,” candidate Romney said in Sioux Center on Friday.

But some stories carry a darker undercurrent, illustrating the toll that ambition can take on family life. Ann says that when her multiple sclerosis was at its worst in the 1990s, Mitt decided to move the family from Boston to Salt Lake City to run the Olympics.  

Mitt notes that he spent much of  his business career on the road, leaving her alone to raise their five rambunctious boys. But even these tales are woven back in to the campaign’s family-friendly message.

Mitt would call home to encourage Ann over the phone during that period, both said. “He told me that what I was doing was more important than what he was doing, that what I was doing was more lasting than what he was doing, and to hang in there,” Ann said.

– Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress

The Republican candidate mingles with voters in Iowa.

CLINTON, Iowa- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was feeling good after a day of non-stop campaigning across rural Iowa on Friday.

“It’s all going well, don’t you think?” Obama asked a group of traveling journalists after he drew repeated cheers at an evening rally here for his proposals to end the war in Iraq and improve the U.S. education system.

But some of those attending the rally were not so happy afterwards. While they were listening to Obama speak inside a local school, their cars were towed away.

According to a representative from the sheriff’s department, there was confusion over a city snow ordinance that prohibits parking in certain areas before they are adequately plowed. Parts of the state were blanketed with snow over the last 24 hours.

For Wanda Hardwick, who brought her daughter to see Obama speak but ended up struggling to find a ride to pick up her car at an impound lot, the events turned an otherwise upbeat experience into a big disappointment.

“This was a big event. You think they (the police) would make an exception,” she said. “This is just spiteful.”

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young

CORALVILLE, Iowa — Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Friday launched a fresh assault against rival John Edwards over questions about campaign funding from corporate lobbyists, rolling out a new television advertisement on the issue.
 
“I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over,” Obama says in the television spot.

The message dovetails with the Obama campaign’s release of a letter from eight Iowans who said they supported John Edwards in the 2004 caucuses but are now supporting Obama because they’re unhappy with multi-million-dollar ads supporting Edwards funded by what they described as “Washington lobbyists”.  
 
Edwards has demanded one outside group tied to a former campaign manager, Alliance for a New America, not run $750,000 worth of ads supporting his presidential bid. But the Obama supporters argued that more than $2 million was being spent to help Edwards from outside groups.

But the Edwards campaign shot back with its own letter from three supporters who said they initially backed Obama but switched. “We were disappointed to learn that Senator Obama took $1.5 million from PACs and Washington lobbyists — and only stopped taking their money days before entering the presidential race,” they said.

Obama also leveled fresh criticism both at Pakistan’s leader Pervez Musharraf and the Bush administration in the aftermath of the assassination of that country’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, saying the United States had to reassess its policies toward Pakistan.
 
“We have poured billions of dollars in support to President Musharraf… and he has not focused on dealing with the terrorist threat that is growing. That is where Al Qaeda is now,” Obama told a crowd gathered in a school gymnasium in Willamsburg, Iowa. “I’ve insisted for many months that we should tell the government of Pakistan that No. 1 that they have to observe democratic practices. And No. 2 they have to get serious about going after Al Qaeda.” 

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young

From a pheasant shoot to prayers before his stump speeches, rising Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s cash-strapped campaign seems to have literally at times been done on a wing and a prayer.

A former Arkansas Governor and ordained Baptist preacher, Huckabee’s unexpected surge in the polls has been attributed in large part to his successful wooing of the Republican Party’s conservative and influential evangelical base.

That means his campaign events often kick off with prayers — a common way to start many public affairs in the American heartland, from rodeos to business breakfasts.

On Thursday night close to 1,000 people bowed their heads in prayer before several speakers took to the podium at an event dubbed “We The People” at a hotel in West Des Moines that ended with a Huckabee stump speech.

Last week at a campaign event for Huckabee sponsored by the Iowa Christian Alliance, Huckabee joined the group in prayers before and at the end of his speech.  He also sprinkled several Bible references during his remarks.

The crucial Iowa caucus on Jan. 3 kicks off the presidential nomination process for both the Republicans and the Democrats for the November White House election.

“When you’re outspent 20 to one, and that’s basically the ratio here, it’s a remarkable story. If we come in second even third it’s still a remarkable story to be outspent like that,” Huckabe said on Thursday night, refering to Republican rival Mitt Romney’s financial advantage over him.

But Huckabee has been hitting key Republican ATMs like Texas and Florida this month in his fund-raising efforts. When December’s numbers are disclosed, he likely is hoping some of his prayers have been answered.

– Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young

Chelsea Clinton joins her mother in an Iowa dinner on Dec. 27.